IMAGINATION
THAT the prospective author should be able to spell with reason- able accuracy and to express his thoughts in grammatical form and clearness and force is to be understood. These are the signs of intelligence, and it requires intelligence to become a writer. But there is one even more important qualification without which it will be useless to seek to gain success as an author. This is imagination of the proper sort—. the creative imagination. 2. This is something that may be developed through study, but not acquired if it at least does not lie dormant. God alone can give imagination, and He, in His wisdom, has given to many men many minds. It would be a dire catastrophe should all men come into the world endowed with the same quality of imagination. To some men are given to understand and grasp the realization of concrete facts. Such men are fitted to be executives. They plan gigantic mergers, organize financial coups and lead the armies of finance and commerce. Others of lesser degree of the same imaginative quality serve in these armies. None of these can think in terms of story plot. A man may be highly imaginative and yet not possess the sort of imagination that makes for the creation of new ideas for stories. The men who have formed the gigantic film companies cannot write stories to be produced. They are organizers. They can imagine and devise the details of the company and undertake its financing, but they cannot write fiction. Thomas A. Edison, himself, could imagine motion pictures, but he could not write his own scripts. It follows, therefore, that the writer must not only have imagination but that this imagination must be of the proper sort. Creative imagination is that quality of mind which enables a person to elaborate and improve known facts and to devise new ideas and combinations of ideas. Some persons imagine themselves to be possessed of this quality when they lack it. If Uncle John tells of his trip to the World's Fair, they remember the details and write them down. This is not authorship. It is merely mechanical reproduction. They will give to their readers all that was given to them, but they will give it unchanged and unimproved. They may, perhaps, frame the story in a better choice of words than the original hero of the story, but they add nothing to the elaboration of the story. They give it no new and entertaining quality. They have memory, but no imagination. This is where so many aspirants fail. They have good memories. They recall many stories. They feel that they are qualified for authorship. They might make excellent newspaper reporters perhaps, because of their retentive memories, but even newspaper work, supposed to favor exactness of statement, requires some imagination that the facts may be seen and presented in the most interesting and attractive light. It is not possible to determine in advance just what the quality of imagination in a person is. It cannot be said in advance that this man can and that man cannot write fiction or photoplays. He must learn through experience and effort whether or not he can. A man may give great promise and never make that promise good. Another may start more slowly because he has never cultivated his imagination and yet he may evolve into a star through slow and painstaking study and practice. The mind must be taught to think just as the child is taught to count. The child that has learned to count from one to ten is better qualified to count to the hundred than the child who cannot but who seeks to do so. And the knowledge of hundreds leads to an understanding of thousands, and that to millions, though only the most expert mathematician can grasp even faintly the limitless possibilities of figures. It is the same with developing the plotting quality. First simple plots must be mastered, and these in turn lead on and on until the mind thinks in plot instead of plot factors or suggestions. Imagination is creative only in that it can develop and embroider known facts. It cannot imagine new ones. We know that there may be a fourth dimension, but we cannot imagine what it is, ICnovevi-tv, length and breadth and thickness, we can imagine in these dimensions, but we cannot imagine in the fourth because we do not know what that fourth dimension is. Even a Verne or a Wells cannot imagine the unknown, though their imaginations have been trained to a point of proficiency that enables them to imagine new and strange combinations. Mr. Wells, for instance, can bring Martians to this earth, but he cannot imagine new attributes for them. He may give them a dozen arms instead of two, but he borrows these from the octopus. They may have a hundred legs, but so has the centipede. Their bodies may be unable to withstand the lighter atmospheric pressure of this planet, but this holds good of certain deep sea creatures at the surface atmosphere. All that the most imaginative author can do is to evolve from old material new and startling combinations. We admire the new combinations and do not trouble to trace them to their source. A score of men may see a man killed by an automobile. John Smith sees only that the man is struck and killed. Frank Jones, more imaginative, may argue a design in the supposed accident. He may imagine the happening to be a clever murder of an enemy through a knowledge of his habits of daily life. Samuel Sprague may change the thought to a duel in the air between an airplane and an airship. William Davis may see in the tragedy a baby carriage propelled by an attractive widow which knocks down a rich and crabbed old bachelor who becomes enamored of the widow through the rencontre. Starting from a common fact, each man according to his degree gives back that fact. Only Smith reports the bare occurrence. The others all change and add to get something new. Smith alone is hopeless. The simplest form of imagination gives back the thought very slightly embroidered, as Jones held the automobile accident and merely added to that a new motive. The higher types of imagination both embroider and transform incident, gaining something new and better. Eventual success will come in precise proportion to the richness of the imagination tempered by good sense. It is not merely extravagance of the returned idea that counts. It is plausibility, as well, that is required. Anything else is untrained and unworthy. This is a point many overlook. It is not sufficient merely to be unusual. It is necessary also to be convincing. It is in this phase of imagination that the authors already cited excel. Thirty or forty years ago Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" was held to be a pleasant and highly . imaginative bit of fiction. Today every imaginative feature of that story has been realized. Perpetual motion inventions are regarded as the toys of the crack brained because it is a well known fact that in all these devices the friction of the parts gradually overcomes the original force. It is known also that in theory gravity ceases at the center of the earth because there the force of the mass attraction is exerted from every point. Verne used something of this idea in his "Trip to the Moon, " but another may imagine a gigantic perpetual motion machine in the center of the earth furnishing power for the entire world, and perhaps thousands of years from now the idea will become an accomplished fact, provided that some other force than gravity operates the machine. Imagination is inherent, but untrained. It can be developed to think along sane and plausible lines or permitted to develop as it will without discipline or direction. One is the imagination of the story writer : the other the mind of the fool. The imagination cannot only be developed but directed in its development so that it does its work well and properly. It is important that in the early stages this be done. The statement is frequently made that the uneducated can write as good plays as the college graduate. This is not true. Theman who does not possess a college education may, and often does, write better plays, but he must have been educated in some manner, and the more ample his education the more fully 'equipped he becomes. Nothing can be taken from the mind that has not already been placed therein. It follows that the educated mind is better developed and better stored with facts than the mind uneducated. The education does not have to be of the schoolroom or the lecture hall, but the mind must be properly stocked, just as the shelves of the storekeeper must be filled, before business can be done. No man, no matter who he may be, can evolve stories from his inner consciousness. He may be singularly inventive, and able to draw upon his imagination for elaboration, but he cannot think more than he has learned, no matter how that learning was acquired. Imagination is merely the ability to store away a fact and remove a fancy precisely as the chemist can take common brown sugar and in the electric furnace transform it into a diamond. If you cannot perform a similar operation you cannot become an author, no matter how great your eagerness nor how convincing the assurances of your friends or would-be teachers. CHAPTER VIII FEEDING THE IMAGINATION 0 matter how active the imagination may be, it must be kept supplied with material with which to work. We are born with minds absolutely a blank. Imagination may be one of its qualities, but the mind contains nothing with which it may be supplied and so it is dormant. The mind must be stored with material through 'reading and observation else imagination is useless. The process of imagination is not so much a process of creation as a process of transmutation; projecting the base material of unoriginal idea into